From the Wall Street Journal, November 2:
Oak Hill Advisors and partners bought 1.7 million acres of eastern hardwood forests to reduce logging and increase carbon deals
A major player in credit markets has made one of the largest U.S. timberland purchases in years, laying Wall Street’s biggest wager yet on forest carbon markets.
Oak Hill Advisors LP, a subsidiary of T. Rowe Price Group Inc. that manages $56 billion and is best known as a corporate-debt investor, said that it led a consortium to pay about $1.8 billion for 1.7 million acres of forest.
The properties spread over 17 eastern states and will be overseen by a unit of environmental-markets firm Anew Climate LLC. Oak Hill last year joined with Anew’s subsidiary Bluesource Sustainable Forests Co. to acquire and manage timberland to maximize how much carbon is stored in the standing trees rather than how much wood is produced from cutting them down.
Anew says that, between the 1.7 million acres acquired from the Forestland Group, a liquidating investment firm, and earlier purchases of about 100,000 acres, it is one of the 10 largest U.S. timberland owners. It is the only one among them focused on carbon markets instead of feeding lumber and pulp mills.
Anew plans to throttle back logging. It expects just 10% to 20% of revenue from the properties will come from harvesting wood, compared with 80% to 90% of the top line under the previous owner, said Jamie Houston, who leads the Anew unit.
“We’re really going to be focused on forest health,” he said. “We’re thinking about this in decades, not years.”
The market for forest-carbon offsets has boomed in recent years as companies sought ways to make up for their greenhouse-gas emissions. The idea behind forest offsets is to pay timberland owners to log less so that the trees keep growing and accumulating carbon.
Polluters can use offsets to cover some of their tab under California’s regulated cap-and-trade system if the landowners follow guidelines that can encumber properties for more than a century.
Increasingly, offsets are sold in so-called voluntary markets in unregulated transactions. Companies use voluntary offsets to scrub carbon from the environmental balance sheets they maintain for investors, and for public relations. Prices for voluntary offsets vary widely and terms range from a year to decades.
Critics of offsets say that many promised harvest reductions are merely theoretical, either because the forests are too remote or rugged to be logged economically or the owners aren’t generally in the business of clear-cutting. And that even when there are fewer harvests, demand from mills means more intense logging elsewhere.An overarching criticism is that offsets allow companies to pay a relatively small price to avoid reducing emissions. Carbon markets have been jammed up lately by companies demanding offsets that represent actual harvest reductions, according to participants in the opaque markets. Landowners have created offsets at a rapid clip, but they have held out for higher prices to justify less logging.....
....MUCH MORE
Previously
"Dutch reforestation company responsible for massive forest fire in Spain"
Huh.
Irony can be pretty ironic.
Climate/Energy: "Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won't be pleasant"
"Deadwood Releasing 10.9 Gigatons of Carbon Every Year – More Than All Fossil Fuel Emissions Combined"
Hence the futility, or folly, or fraud of "plant a tree" carbon offsets.
However....people with an interest in insect farts may have a solution.
More Carbon Credit Shenanigans: The Massachusetts Audubon Society
Following on the sordid tale of the Nature Conservancy's racket.
"A Top U.S. Seller of Carbon Offsets Starts Investigating Its Own Projects"
"Norway, Sweden, and Finland Evicting Ugandan Farmers For Carbon Credits"
One of the worst approaches to carbon capital there is.The folks who, fifteen years ago, were likening carbon credits to the old skool Catholic church selling indulgences to absolve rich parishioners of their sins were not that far off. The credits basically allow you to continue doing what you were doing or, as US climate czar John Kerry said when jetting off to Iceland in his private plane to receive a climate change leadership award....
And many, many more. Use the 'search blog' box, upper left if interested.
And President Biden's special envoy Mr. Kerry? He's flying commercial to COP 27 in Egypt after being shamed over the use of his personal planes for his climate rambles.
